Morgan Fisher (born 1942) gained prominence in the early 1970s as an experimental filmmaker in the Los Angeles Structuralist school. In the mid 1990s he turned to monochrome painting. This volume surveys two recent shows in Austria and Germany.

Cheyney Thompson has made the technology, production and distribution of painting the subject of his work. His Chronochromes (2009–2011) are composed using the color system devised by Albert H. Munsell in the early 1900s. Thompson grafts this system onto a calendar: each day is assigned a complementary hue pair, with every hour changing the value, and every month changing the saturation, of each brushstroke.

In 1912, in several European cities, a handful of artists--Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia and Robert Delaunay--presented the first abstract pictures to the public. Inventing Abstraction, published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, celebrates the centennial of this bold new type of artwork. It traces the development of abstraction as it moved through a network of modern artists, from Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp to Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, sweeping across nations and across media. This richly illustrated publication covers a wide range of artistic production--including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, film, photography, sound poetry, atonal music and non-narrative dance--to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years. An introductory essay by Leah Dickerman, Curator in the Museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, is followed by focused studies of key groups of works, events and critical issues in abstraction’s early history by renowned scholars from a variety of fields.

This book brings together a selection of Jean-Luc Moulčne's photographs, sculptures and drawings, from 1977 to 2008, with an emphasis on work done in the past decade. Moulčne's multimedia activities--mostly recording in photography--utilize negations and political interventions in everyday life.

Retrospektive covers more than three decades of Berlin-based Isa Genzken's career, with over 150 images, some of which are published here for the first time. Although she works in a variety of media, Genzken is best known for her architectural sculptures made from colorful materials, including mirrored sheets, fluorescent plastic and glass. A catalogue for Open, Sesame!, Genzken's retrospective exhibition at Cologne's Museum Ludwig and London's Whitechapel Gallery, this volume offers the most definitive look yet at an influential and notoriously reclusive artist. Featured are essays by renowned critic Yves-Alain Bois, curators Ulrich Loocks, Donna De Salvo and Ian White, an interview with Museum Ludwig Director Kasper König and contributions from artists Dan Graham, Wolfgang Tillmans and Lawrence Weiner.

Fernand Léger (1881-1955) is one of the few Modernist artists that can be said to have anticipated both American Abstraction and American Pop, and to have made a deliberate relationship with American culture: He visited the U.S. several times, and during the Second World War, from 1940 to 1945, he lived in exile in New York. In America, Léger found much to admire--above all, a dynamic embrace of industry sympathetic to his own quasi-Futurist love of technological energies. An early critic of Léger described him as more of a "Tubist" than a Cubist, noting the cool metal cylinders that fill his early work. It was through such motifs that the artist approached modern life, viewing industry as a force for the good and its translation into art as a Modern vernacular. "Our pictures are our slang," he optimistically declared towards the end of his stay in New York. During that time, Léger had produced some of his most important works, which found a ready audience in the younger American artists surrounding him. Paris-New York covers the artist's entire oeuvre, from the Cubist-influenced early work to the later, cheerful large-format paintings. Special attention is paid to the American dimension of Léger's oeuvre, and the volume traces his impact on American artists--primarily on Roy Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, but also on other late twentieth-century artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Al Held, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

Published by Thea Westreich/Ethan Wagner.Text by Yve-Alain Bois.

Important European galleries and museums exhibited French painter Martin Barré continuously from the time he first came on the scene in the mid-1950s until his death in 1993. Despite the perplexing lack of exposure in America, today many young painters look to Barré as an exemplar of the "new Modernity" and hold him in esteem for the thoughtful, inventive and sensitive ways he explored line, form, color and the two-dimensional surface. This interest has been responsible, at least in part, for a renewed focus on Barré's work lately-as well as a reconsideration of his place in the history of painting. This volume is the first to cover the artist's complete oeuvre, from 1955 to 1992, and it is the most extensively illustrated yet in print. Noted art historian and critic Yve-Alain Bois contributes a stunning essay reflecting on the singular achievement of this history-making artist. Martin Barré, the historically important artist, was born in Nante, France in 1924. His career spanned much of the latter half of the 20th century. He emerged on the Paris scene in the mid-1950's and died in 1993, at the age of 69. During his lifetime, important museums and galleries across Europe regularly exhibited his work. Barré effectively transcended the time when the ideals of Modernism gave way to the new spirit of contemporary art. And, as a contemporary artist, Barré's inventive and sensitive exploration of line, color and form and the two-dimensional surface formed a singular achievement in the history of abstract painting. In recent years, Barré has received international attention. In 2006 the Centre Pompidou hung three of its trove of Barré paintings with pride of place in one of its permanent galleries, along with work by Carl Andre, Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman. In its 2001 show, As Painting: Division and Displacement, the Wexner Center for the Arts prominently exhibited Barré's paintings with works by Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman and Jacques Villeglé. In 2008, he was featured in a one person show organized by Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner at Andrew Kreps Gallery.

The work of Gabriel Orozco is an exemplary adventure of ideas and objects. Always generously implicating the spectator, Orozco draws on a large material repertoire to produce quiet shifts in commonplace scenarios. This book, published to coincide with Orozco's exhibition at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, is the first substantial monograph on the artist, and testifies to the range of his investigations, from tiny adjustments in everyday locations (such as breath on a piano or reflections in a puddle) to more recent preoccupations with spherical forms in collage and paint. In an extensive interview with Briony Fer, the artist explains some of the conceptual premises of his art. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh situates Orozco´s various sculptural practices within twentieth-century precedents and the climate of postwar consumerism and assesses them as manifestations of a shift in object-subject relations. And Yves-Alain Bois explores Orozco's recent "return" to painting, considering the structural logic of his canvases, in which Orozco deploys self-imposed rules to plot compositions (or "diagrams," as he describes them). With insightful texts and hundreds of illustrations, this big, bold, 360-page book is the definitive work to date on one of the most influential contemporary artists.

Art from the Verbund Collection

The recently founded (2004) and very actively acquisitive Verbund Collection integrates contemporary American and European art with works created since 1970. Its two central areas of interest are pieces exploring ideas of performance or space and place. Under the rubric of performance, Verbund, funded by the German power company of the same name, has gathered a substantial block of early Cindy Sherman, along with works by Valerie Export, Birgit Jürgenssen, Francesca Woodman, Sarah Lucas, Urs Lüthi, Gilbert and George and Gillian Wearing. Under the rubric of "spaces/places," holdings range from the works of Gordon Matta-Clark, which intervene in existing architectural structures, through Fred Sandback's Minimalist drawings in thread, to the organically formed objects of Ernest Neto, and include Louise Lawler, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jeff Wall, Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, Simon Starling, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Gabriel Orozco and Loan Nguyen.

Published by Tate Publishing.Introduction text by Michael Bracewell.

Written and directed by the artists and released to coincide with their major international traveling retrospective beginning in 2007 at Tate Modern in London, the feature-length film The World of Gilbert & George is an extraordinary journey into the work of this lively and controversial duo. Appearing on DVD for the first time, it is not simply a profile but an artwork in its own right--an expression of the emotional extremes of modern existence, and a stark portrayal of the streets of London. Gilbert & George "decided that the film should contain, explore and express ALL of our thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreads, dreams, loves, nightmares, disasters, prophecies, memories and tears." We see the artists embedded in the bleak urban surrounds of 1980s London, evoking in their art the desires and tensions of its disillusioned youth alongside their own eccentricities. Church spires and city streets, youths and drunks, dancing and tea-drinking all take on an affecting symbolism when viewed from the unique perspective of Gilbert & George.

The now legendary cover designs for the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures (1979) and the New Order single "Blue Monday" (1983) brought the Manchester graphic designer Peter Saville immediate international renown, with their somber yet lush Modernist edge. Saville was the cofounder of Factory Records, and was single-handedly responsible for its unique house style, so widely imitated, and so entirely Saville's own. Outside of the Factory stable he has produced covers for, among others, Patti Smith, Roxy Music, Wham!, Suede and Pulp, and has also collaborated on many architectural, fashion and interior design ventures, including the famous Manchester nightclub the Haçienda, and collaborations with Nick Knight, David Chippenfield and Stella McCartney. His sensibility combines unerring elegance with a remarkable ability to facture imagery that epitomizes and defines a cultural moment. Based on his solo exhibition at the Migros Museum in Zurich, which also traveled to the ICA London, this book surveys Saville's extensive archives for the first time. It was conceived and designed in close collaboration with Saville; as such, it is the first publication to be designed by the artist.

Born in Manchester (U.K.) in 1955, Peter Saville studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic. He found early inspiration in the elegantly ordered aesthetic of Jan Tschichold, the German-born book and type designer who was to become the chief propagandist for the New Typography. In 1979 he co-founded Factory Records (with Tony Wilson), and in the following year he co-designed the famous Haçienda nightclub.

Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers.Edited by Friedemann Malsch and Christiane Meyer-Stoll. Essays by Yve-Alain Bois and Thierry Davila.

As a student at Yale, Fred Sandback struggled with sculpture until George Sugarmann told him "if you are so sick of the parts, why not just make a line with a ball of string and be done with it." For the rest of his career, Sandback used taut and resonant strings to sculpt space and light. Ephemeral and site-specific, his Minimalist sculptures, familiar to visitors to Dia:Beacon among other museums, use colorful acrylic yarn strung between the ceiling and floor or into the corners of an exhibition space to interrupt and delineate space, refer to drawing, evoke volume, create magical boundaries that beg to be traversed, and give the viewer occasion to pause and consider. His clusters of lines can seem to create walls or doors, or make the space reverberate like the body of an instrument whose strings have just been plucked. The artist himself called them "pedestrian spaces" by which he meant to describe both the viewer as a passerby and his art as an everyday thing. Following his death, his remaining works feel less pedestrian, less everyday, more precious and more ephemeral, each irreplacable one ready, as many have, to revert to a tangle of threads.

Published by Ludion.Essays by Yve-Alain Bois, Sarah Whitfield and Georges Rocque.

Among those painters who incontestably left their mark on twentieth-century art, Bonnard rises to the top again and again. Museums, scholars and viewers regularly return to his oeuvre for reinterpretation, passionate and contradictory, of what it means to be Modern. In having followed a very personal calling--literally and figuratively interior, particularly compared to the work of friends like Matisse--Bonnard created work as innovative as any of his contemporaries'. His recurring themes--the nude (both classical and erotic), the landscape, domestic life, and the self-portrait--evolve with him from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, from Paris to the south of France, alive with constant reinvention. Although for Bonnard the subject was always important, his work navigates a sophisticated dialectic between the givens of perception and memory, between the image before our eyes and all that it suggests. This substantial reference includes work from the Hermitage and the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, which sponsored its publication. Contributors include Yve-Alain Bois, Sarah Whitfield, and Georges Roque. Photographs from Dina Verny and Henri Cartier-Bresson among others document the era and Bonnard's models as he saw them.

Published by The Drawing Center.Edited by Catherine de Zegher. Introduction by Yve-Alain Bois and Yves Aupetitallot.

The art world has a longstanding respect for and fascination with artists' sketchbooks. It is within those pages that we get true insight into process--the labor and intensity that constitute a work of art. In the 1960s, this interest in exploration flourished and established drawing as an art form in and of itself. This exhibition catalogue for Kelly's recent show of drawings contains selections from over 20 years of the artist's notebooks including sketches made on magazine advertisements, newspaper clippings, maps, Sno-Cone wrappers, and telegrams. Tablet reveals an artist usually associated with monochromatic forms to be vitally, and sometimes even hilariously, engaged in the everyday world.

This volume surveys the history of modern art, from the turn of the century to approximately 1970. A unique and unprecedented partnership between the Guggenheim Museum and the Musée national d'art moderne brings together more than 300 paintings, sculptures and drawings by over 150 artists, including Joseph Beuys, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. The Musée and the Guggenheim represent two distinct kinds of museums: a public, government-run institution and a private museum. The former is one institution within a multidisciplinary cultural center; the latter has grown from a private collection of non-objective painting into a network of international museums of modern and contemporary art. One originally celebrated almost exclusively the modern art produced in France, the other various abstract painters from the European avant-garde. Thus does Rendezvous allow a dialogue between two museums renowned for their contributions to the history of Modernism.

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Essay by Susan Kismaric. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo is one of the foremost figures of modern photography and the only photographer among the great Mexican artists of the 20th century. Bravo has produced work of exceptional quality throughout his long career: formal experiments of the 1920s were followed by modernists works inspired by such international trends as Surrealism, and the early 30s saw him develop a gifted personal style that suggested specific Mexican customs and rituals. The majority of this volume's 175 tritone plates were made from rare vintage prints assembled from private collections or furnished by the artist; many have never before been published and some have not been seen or exhibited since the 1930s. This volume was published in conjunction with a 1997 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

With the hotly discussed resurgence of painting at the dawn of the new century, it is clear that reports of the medium's death have been greatly exaggerated. Painting at the Edge of the World explores the possibilities of a redefinition and ''hybridization'' of painting begun in the 1960s, examining the manifestations of these new artistic vistas in the present day. This full-color catalogue features illustrations and a variety of critical texts by some of the most exciting established and emerging critical voices working today, in addition to work by an international and intergenerational group of artists hailing from places as diverse as Brazil, Ethiopia, Germany, South Africa, Scotland, Japan, Belgium, Iran, Italy, and the United States. Designed in two sections--a gatefold plate section containing reproductions of the work, and a french-folded section containing critical essays--the book brings together a wide range of contemporary views on painting from a diverse array of disciplines, including the visual arts, film, architecture, design, and music in an attempt to assess the relevance of painting in the contemporary global context. In addition, Painting at the Edge of the World includes documentation of each artist's work and an examination of their artistic methodology.